US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford issued a statement Monday denying weekend media reports that the US plans to leave around 1,000 troops in Syria, saying the reports are “factually incorrect.”

Dunford presented the current planned “residual force” as 200, saying that this hadn’t changed since February. The US announced 200 would stay on February 21, but on February 22 officially increased that number to 400.

It’s not clear from Dunford’s statement where the “incorrect” aspect of the new report, which came out of a Wall Street Journal, exists. That report suggested that the 1,000 figure was not yet finalized, but was being discussed. Dunford’s comments didn’t include any details on what is actually being discussed, but just that nothing was finalized.

Webmaster's Commentary:

I think the multiple troop numbers being given, are simply a way of creating confusion about how many US troops the US does have in Syria.

Colorado has joined 11 other states captured by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election to pass a legislative measure to award the winner of the popular vote count with their Electoral College votes.

Democrat Gov. Jared Polis signed the measure on Friday, though it will only take effect if enough states – those representing at least 270 of the electoral votes, the amount needed to win a presidential election – sign onto the same law.

With Colorado’s inclusion, the law has been passed in states representing 181 of the votes.

The move marks yet another in a frightening display which has seen states still raging about Clinton’s defeat, attempt to abolish the Constitutional system that prevents those with massive populations – such as the liberal cesspools of New York and California – from deciding who leads the rest of the country.

Currently one of the dirtiest election campaigns of all time is raging in the “Jewish state”. And when the elections take place on April 9, King Bibi will use all means to continue his “corrupt monarchy.”

Switzerland is about to have a national election with electronic voting, overseen by Swiss Post; e-voting is a terrible idea and the general consensus among security experts who don't work for e-voting vendors is that it shouldn't be attempted, but if you put out an RFP for magic beans, someone will always show up to sell you magic beans, whether or not magic beans exist.

Swiss Post contracted with Barcelona firm Scytl to build the system, then consulted with outside security experts and KPMG to audit the system, and then announced a bug-bounty program that would allow people who promised to only disclose defects on Swiss Post's terms to look at some of the source code.

Webmaster's Commentary:

IF the US, as a whole, wanted a clean voting system, it would be by paper ballot, and not electronic voting whatsoever.

But of course, the Powers that Be do not want an unriggable system; they want a system to be gamed in favor of the highest bidder, in terms of which Presidential candidate will do the most for the corporate entities which them, once they have become elected.

The military-industrial complex,the Deep State, and major corporations hate and revile a clean voting system, because it just might actually give people the candidate they wanted, rather than those the corporations want; and therein lies the rub.

America's current voting system, particularly at the national level, is a very Kabuki-like show, and give the illusion of "people-power, with lots and sound and fury, and signifying nothing.

Because by the time Presidential candidates are chosen, they are chosen to continue the objectives of the Deep State, Corporations, and the military industrial complex.

Researchers have found a severe issue in the new Swiss internet voting system that they say would let someone alter votes undetected. They say it should put a halt to Switzerland’s plan to roll out the system in real elections this year.

In one fell swoop, the “Demoncrat” Democrats went from declaring their two-years-in-the-making Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy, which was a dogmatic stance against foreign interference in elections, to voting to allow all illegal immigrants (non-citizens) to freely vote in our U.S. elections. Unbelievable. Well, not really. Not considering that the Democrats live by their own insane rules that only apply when they say they apply. Still, this gets much, much better, so keep reading.

House Democrats passed the For the People Act (H.R. 1) this past week.
The legislation makes it legal for illegal Americans and foreigners to vote in elections. The bill also makes voter harvesting legal.

Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) offered a motion to the amendment to reaffirm that ONLY US citizens should have the right to vote — which is the law.
Democrats rejected the vote.

On Thursday, on a party line vote, Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats in the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1, dubbed the “For the People Act of 2019.” It is a massive federal intrusion into the states’ constitutionally-protected realm of regulating and maintaining voter rolls.

It’s also a recipe for voter fraud. Republicans in the House correctly derided it as a “voter fraud and election theft” bill. But that understates how bad it is. H.R. 1 rolls out the red carpet for election fraud.

This is true in multiple respects. A few of the most outrageous provisions in the bill are the following:

Update: House Democrats voted Friday to defend localities that allow illegal immigrants to vote in their elections, turning back a GOP attempt to discourage the practice. As The Washington Times reports, the vote marks a stunning reversal from just six months ago, when the chamber - then under GOP control - voted to decry illegal immigrant voting.

“We are prepared to open up the political process and let all of the people come in,” Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and hero of the civil rights movement, told colleagues as he led opposition to the GOP measure.

Texas Republican. Rep. Dan Crenshaw raged:

“It sounds like I’m making it up. What kind of government would cancel the vote of its own citizens, and replace it with noncitizens?”

The authorities of Ukraine have just announced their refusal to accredit Germans as observers to the upcoming elections, including many representatives of the political party “Die Linke”. This was revealed this morning, Monday, March 4th, by the head of Die Linke (The Left) party in the Kvakenbrück parliament, Andreas Maurer.

“Accreditation of public and state observers is very tough and slow. There is no support from Ukraine for observers from Germany to take part, ” Maurer said.

According to Maurer, Ukraine fears that among the representatives from Germany, German politicians and social activists with a pro-Russian stance may come to the polls.

Speaking Sunday at the historic Brown Chapel AME Church, former secretary of state, first lady and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton suggested a key Supreme Court decision may have cost her the White House.

Clinton was participating in an annual commemoration of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches that included the infamous “Bloody Sunday,” when civil rights activists were viciously beaten by white police and protesters. The church where she spoke was the starting point for the marches, which were organized by a group that was pushing for voting rights and included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. Clinton connected the push for voting rights to her 2016 presidential campaign.

Voter Fraud Crisis: I estimate about 900,000 aliens illegally voted in midterms. Texas and PA numbers confirm massive problem. This is the civil rights issue of our time -- Americans need to have their votes protected! @RealDonaldTrump should direct DOJ to get on the ball!

One pillar of dogma among leftist activists is that voter ID laws, under which citizens are required to present a valid form of identification in order to cast ballots in elections, amount to insidious and racist forms of "voter suppression." That term deserves to be placed in scare quotes because it's often employed as a catch-all phrase to describe any policy or idea that liberals believe would reduce their chances of winning. Voter ID laws have been upheld by the Supreme Court as constitutional, and enjoy overwhelming public support -- including approval from large majorities of racial minorities, who evidently don't share the professional Left's racialized hysteria. We've written previously about how, if reducing turnout among certain populations truly were the goal of such laws, they've failed miserably.

An Israeli private spy company attempted to influence a local US election as part of a larger attempt to infiltrate American politics, according to a report from The New Yorker / ... Psy-Group, a defunct private intelligence agency staffed with former Israeli spies, attempted to influence at least one local US election and other domestic affairs, according to a report from The New Yorker's Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow. The company even courted President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, and is now under investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller, the report said ... The company went on to use fake websites, online avatars, and staged in-person interactions as part of an effort to influence the results of local elections of change the perception of certain events in the US, at the behest of a series of private clients.

Diebold: the controversial manufacturer of voting and ATM machines, whose name conjures up the demons of Ohio’s 2004 presidential election irregularities, is now finally under indictment for a “worldwide pattern of criminal conduct.” Federal prosecutors filed charges against Diebold, Inc. on Tuesday, October 22, 2013 alleging that the North Canton, Ohio-based security and manufacturing company bribed government officials and falsified documents to obtain business in China, Indonesia and Russia. Diebold has agreed to pay $50 million to settle the two criminal counts against it.

As TYT previously reported, the results of several recent high-profile Kansas primaries last month were delayed for many hours due to a computer “glitch” in Johnson County, the state’s most populous county.

Before the glitch, sitting Governor Jeff Colyer reportedly led Secretary of State Kris Kobach by 44 votes in the Republican gubernatorial primary, and Brent Welder led Sharice Davids by seven points in the Democratic primary for Kansas’s third House district seat. After the glitch, Kobach and Davids took the lead in their respective races. Colyer and Welder both conceded without requesting recounts.

Elections are big business, and look no further than the ongoing frenzy over the upcoming Nigerian election for proof. It is hard to miss how much money is being made in both the main event and the ecosystem around it.

Politicians are no longer just candidates, but also brands, backed by elaborate merchandising and advertising apparatuses that are designed to catapult their public image to victory. Outside the core tug of war, media companies around the world wrestle for the attention of viewers, listeners and readers with elaborate, attention-grabbing infographics and chyrons.

The triumph of political style over substance in the capitalist election is almost complete, and with it the unparalleled influence of money over political decision-making. As Nigeria inches towards this critical vote, it does so in the shadow of profound questions about the changing nature of elections in Africa and beyond.

It’s always mildly surprising when the Democrats pull off another year of major election fraud and the American people don’t just burn the place down like France in response.

The 2018 midterms ended up being a train wreck of voter fraud, stolen elections and customary malfeasance from the Democrats. No wonder they fought tooth and nail in early 2017 to get President Trump to disband his commission to investigate vote fraud.

Now that the dust has settled, and Republicans have “lost” 40 seats in the House, we can start to examine exactly how this happened.

California in particular is an example of a spectacular fraud this year. Republicans lost seven out of 14 seats in California long after the election was over, as “harvested” ballots continued to pour in.

“Ballot harvesting” is such a profitable practice for Democrats, which the left-leaning Wikipedia doesn’t even provide an entry to explain.

Even if you vote, or not, and your party wins, or not, because this system is set up this way, the police state will continue. Constantly voting for the lesser of two evils has manifested into an inevitable cycle in which the government gets more powerful and the people get poorer. But don’t take my word for it, just look at the current state of America. -- 50 percent of all American workers make less than $30,533 a year. In the meantime, however, the politically connected elite made up of the 0.1% have increased their wealth by more than $1 trillion in the past year. One trillion also happens to be the same amount of money that the US taxpayer has had placed on their backs in the form of government debt in the last year too. Coincidence? Probably not.

A proposal to overthrow the constitutionally mandated system for electing the president and vice president of the United States—known as the Electoral College—without going through the effort of amending the U.S. Constitution has three-fifths of the support its backers say it needs to become a reality.

According to a group called National Popular Vote (NPV), the proposal “would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.” Currently, 48 states give all their electoral votes to the candidate who prevails in the popular vote in that state. Nebraska and Maine use a different formula, awarding some of their electors by congressional district.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe called on the state Wednesday to immediately purge 11,198 noncitizen voters who were confirmed as registered to vote despite not being eligible, reports the Washington Times.

State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican and former chairman of a House government oversight panel, said the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, belatedly acknowledged the large number of noncitizens in communications over the past two months.

“I believe that we need to take action and have those people removed immediately from the rolls,” Mr. Metcalfe told The Washington Times. “They were never eligible to vote.” -Washington Times

You have to show an I.D. to buy liquor, get a driver’s licence, get a bank account, when you get pulled over for a traffic violation, when you make a bank transaction, when you buy a gun, when you use a credit card (in some cases), when you initiate a doctor patient relationship, and so on. Nobody calls that racist, but the hypocritical, lying, thieving Democrats who are incapable of earning an honest vote, think it’s racist – why – because they need the illegal immigrants to vote for them – which they do preponderantly.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe called on the state Wednesday to immediately purge 11,198 noncitizen voters who were confirmed as registered to vote despite not being eligible, reports the Washington Times.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe called on the state Wednesday to immediately purge 11,198 noncitizen voters who were confirmed as registered to vote despite not being eligible, reports the Washington Times.

Photo: The Patriot Post
State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican and former chairman of a House government oversight panel, said the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, belatedly acknowledged the large number of noncitizens in communications over the past two months.

“I believe that we need to take action and have those people removed immediately from the rolls,” Mr. Metcalfe told The Washington Times. “They were never eligible to vote.” -Washington Times

Webmaster's Commentary:

"No Wall" at our Southern Borders translates into more and more illegal voters in our political contests, which is why The Democrats LOVE open border policies.

The man in charge of elections in Texas made a surprise announcement last week: As many as 95,000 noncitizens had registered to vote, and 58,000 of them may have voted in at least one election between 1996 and 2018.

The finding announced by Texas Secretary of State David Whitley is serious, and almost immediately the news became the subject of sensational statements.

Some, such as President Donald Trump, assert that this constitutes proof that 58,000 individuals unlawfully voted in Texas. Activists on the left, meanwhile, dismiss the findings altogether as merely setting the stage for voter purges and disenfranchisement.

Supporters of Venezuela’s Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) opposition coalition marched on the headquarters of the United Nations in Caracas Monday to protest the possibility of the international body sending an observer mission to monitor the country’s upcoming May 20 elections.

In a letter addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the opposition alleged that an observer mission would “give a veneer of legality to an [electoral] process that lacks it.”

Last month, the Venezuelan electoral authorities formally invited the UN to send an observer mission to monitor the upcoming elections as part of an agreement negotiated between the government and the MUD, which the latter ultimately refused to sign. The UN is yet to confirm whether it will send a delegation in May.

An evaluation by the Texas Secretary of State's office discovered that about 95,000 people identified by the Texas Department of Public Safety as non-U.S. citizens have a matching voting registration record. The state claims 58,000 of those people voted in one or more state elections over 22 years.

For perspective, during the 2018 Gubernatorial election, more than 15.7 million people were registered to vote, and more than 8.3 million actually voted.

In an advisory released Friday, the Texas Secretary of State, David Whitley, announced the findings from its voter registration maintenance activities.

The maintenance activity was done in accordance with federal and state law to ensure that only qualified voters — who must first and foremost be U.S. citizens — are registered to vote in Texas elections, per the Secretary of State.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that there were 95,000 individuals who had been identified “non-US citizens” as being registered to vote in the Lone Star State. What’s more striking is that evidence presented by Texas Secretary of State David Whitely confirms that 58,000 of these individuals have broken the law and voted in “one or more” recent elections.

According to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office, the Texas Department of Public Safety has identified 58,000 non-US citizens who have voted in at least one Texas election since 1996, reports NBCDFW.

Former Vice President Joe Biden blamed Democrat losses in Florida and Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial races on Republican-driven electoral fraud via “voter ID laws” that “keep people from being able to vote.”

Webmaster's Commentary:

The only people voter ID laws keep from voting are those who are not supposed to vote!

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced Monday that he is introducing a legislative package that would repeal voter identification requirements and implement no-excuse absentee voting.

The package also addresses campaign finance, proposing to limit large campaign contributions, ban contributions made directly by corporations and businesses and ban the use of campaign funds for personal use.

Northam said in a statement announcing the legislation that the package would "encourage every eligible voter to exercise" their right to vote.

“Participation makes our democracy strong — we should encourage every eligible voter to exercise this fundamental right, rather than creating unnecessary barriers that make getting to the ballot box difficult,” Northam said.

During last November's midterm elections, California Republicans in several districts watched election night victories melt into losses thanks to a tactic employed by Democrats called "ballot harvesting," which allows anyone to go door-to-door and collect mail-in ballots on behalf of voters.

Illegal in many states, the practice flipped the Republican stronghold of Orange County completely blue after an unprecedented 250,000 vote-by-mail drop-offs were counted according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

As 2020 approaches, Democrats in Congress want to apply several California voting laws across the country via their "For The People Act," or H.R.1, which would require all 50 states to adopt automatic voter registration based on federal databases - such as those on food stamps. It also mandates looser rules governing provisional ballots, two weeks of early voting, prohibits restrictions on voting by mail, and limits the ability for states to remove voters from rolls.

Hyo Suk George lived legally in the United States for nearly 20 years before she voted in her first election, coaxed to cast her ballot by an enthusiastic town council member at church.

To register, she presented a green card, Social Security number and driver’s license — proof enough for the elections officials in Columbus County — then voted in 2008, 2010 and 2016.

But on Thursday, George, 70, faced charges of illegal voting from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, for which she might have spent six months in prison. Instead, U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle chastised the elections board in Whiteville, letting George go with a $100 fine.

Not so long ago, prominent Democrats were insisting that voter fraud did not exist in the United States. Others conceded that it existed, but that it was so rare as to be irrelevant to the outcome of elections. Liberal media sources like U.S. News scoffed that looking for voter fraud was like going on a “unicorn hunt.”

Notably, in early 2017 then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi mocked President Trump’s claim that voter fraud occurred in the 2016 presidential election. She called his focus on voter fraud “really strange,” adding, “I frankly feel very sad for the president making this claim.” She asked Republicans to join her in declaring that “we have confidence in our system and that we always respect the results of the election.”

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Democrat strategy” of importing a permanent underclass of welfare-dependent foreign-born voters will transform the United States into the left wing, sanctuary state of California.

In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Saturday, Brooks said the Democrats’ open borders, mass immigration plan is ultimately to replace native-born American voters with a foreign-born population.

If at first you don’t succeed, change the rules of the game so that you can. This has been the modus operandi of the Democrat Party for a long time, and Dems are again putting it to work with their new House majority.

HR 1, the first bill to be introduced in the new session, has been euphemistically called the For the People Act. Its full title is, get this, “To expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and for other purposes.”

This so-called voter-reform bill was introduced by Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD), and Democrats are hoping to use it to fundamentally change (there’s that phrase again) America’s voting and campaign-finance system.

How does it work? Spoiler alert — it’s totally rigged to tip the scales in favor of a putting a leftist government in permanent power in the U.S.

Judicial Watch won a significant victory for election integrity last week when it signed a settlement agreement with the State of California and Los Angeles County that could potentially remove as many as 1.5 million voters–all of whom are listed as inactive but still registered as of April 27,2018–from the rolls in Los Angeles County.

According to the Los Angeles Registrar-Recorder County Clerk’s website, there were 5.2 million registered voters in the county eligible to vote in the November 2018 general election, of which 3.7 million, or 71 percent, were classified as active and 1.5 million, or 29 percent, were classified as inactive but still registered and eligible to vote.

A total of 2.9 million votes, or about 57 percent of all registered voters, were cast in the highest turnout race on the ballot in the November 2018 general election, the gubernatorial contest between Gavin Newsom and John Cox.

Two other operations — one run by Tovo Labs and another by Dialectica — also sought to use disinformation tactics to influence voters away from Moore. Tovo Labs set up websites posing as Christian and moderate conservatives while Dialectica touted its “new generation of information weapons” and three-month service in the Alabama election “meme war.”

Dialectica CEO Joohn Choe said on Medium that they “affected the outcome” of the election by targeting Alabamians with messaging on social media that “increased their propensity” to vote for the Democratic candidate “or decreased their propensity to vote for Moore.”.

“It is clear that we successfully drove up Democratic turnout and drove down Republican turnout in the districts we targeted,” Tovo Labs wrote in a post of its own.

The strange saga of pro-Democratic activists meddling in the Alabama election began last month with leaked documents exposing the Roy Moore “Russian bot” scandal to be a false-flag operation.

A series of articles published in the past week have revealed that the New Knowledge think tank conducted a “false flag” operation to influence the 2017 Alabama state election and make it appear that Russia was conducting a Twitter campaign to back its preferred candidate. New Knowledge is closely connected to the US intelligence agencies and has been widely cited as an impartial investigator of “Russian meddling” in US politics.

The state Senate voted Tuesday to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a voter ID bill, one of the final steps needed before the state requires voters to show photo identification at the polls.

The Senate voted 33-12 to override. In order to enact the law over Cooper’s objection, the House will also have to vote to override his veto. The House and Senate passed the bill with veto-proof majorities before the Democratic governor vetoed it. The measure would require certain forms of photo ID to vote in person.

It was one of those tug-on-the-heartstrings, tear-jerking, carefully curated narratives about DREAMers we're supposed to read and respond to with sympathy.

But a story that ran in the Los Angeles Times yesterday accidentally did more to raise questions about the issue of ballot-harvesting in California than any raving right-wing tome could ever do.

The Times describes how California's famed ballot-harvesters, who flipped places such as Orange County blue by "helping" fill out, turn in, and continue to turn in ballots from otherwise uncommitted voters until they got the result they wanted, aren't actually U.S. citizens. Here are the DREAMers in action, "helping" the voters to vote the way they wanted:

I'm going to take this opportunity to discuss what happened a while back when Hilary Clinton made the following statements about the so called fake news. I'm sure everyone has heard the argument from the mainstream media by now that mainstream news outlets called the presidential election for Hilary Clinton and were probably hoping that if they said it enough times then this would provide enough social proof for voters to go out there and vote for Hilary. By the way her presidential campaign cost over one billion dollars. When she lost she was throwing furniture around the room on election and getting violent with people. But when she finally calmed down she brought up the issue of fake news at a speech for Harry Reid's retirement party mentioning that the US government and Silicon Valley were going to team up and start to punish fake news sites.

Alabama's attorney general is reportedly starting to scrutinize a disinformation campaign that targeted GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore in last year's special election.

Steve Marshall told The Washington Post on Thursday that he is in the process of collecting information about the disinformation campaign called "Project Birmingham," which he says possibly could have affected Moore's tight race against Doug Jones, his Democratic opponent who ultimately won the election.

“The information is concerning,” Marshall told the Post. “The impact it had on the election is something that’s significant for us to explore, and we’ll go from there.”

The leader of Ukraine’s Batkivshchina party, Yulia Timoshenko, has pointed to mass violations in last Sunday’s elections of heads of territorial communities.

"The elections were terrible. I’ve been in politics for many years and I’ve seen many things. What I witnessed this time, though, was extraordinary," she said. "Ballot papers were photocopied, ballot papers were totally unprotected, a hundred faked ballot papers with marks suddenly emerged out of nowhere… Bribery was massive through all resources available to the current legislators who participated in the election from the current authorities."

Also, Timoshenko complained about the return of the notorious situation in which a large percentage of voters cast their ballots at home without any officially recognized excuses or certificates.

An internal audit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles released Monday shows about 1,500 customers may have been improperly registered to vote.

“Approximately 1,500 customers may have been registered to vote in error,” the DMV wrote in a letter Monday to the Secretary of State’s Office. “This error has been corrected and is separate from the processing error we notified you about in writing on September 5.” Non-citizens are among the affected customers, according to Jessica Gonzalez, a DMV spokeswoman.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles on Wednesday said it has discovered it sent the Secretary of State’s Office 23,000 erroneous voter registrations.

The agency said the errors occurred within the state’s Motor Voter program — which allows eligible applicants getting a driver license to be automatically registered to vote.

The DMV said the errors stem from technicians toggling between multiple screens and registration information being improperly merged. According to the agency, 1,600 residents did not complete a voter registration affidavit and had their information sent to the secretary of state, which maintains the state’s list of registered voters. The DMV said none of the applicants were undocumented immigrants.

The Integrity Initiative, a British pseudo-NGO tasked with running anti-Russian propaganda operation, was recently exposed. Further digging into it revealed a much wider operation. It seems to involve a mole British spies inserted into the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Three weeks ago internal budget proposals and member lists of the Integrity Initiative were posted anonymously on some website. We discussed those in detail under the headline: British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns:

In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia propaganda into the western media stream.
We have already seen many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be part of a different project.

An early-morning fire in Congo’s capital destroyed thousands of voting machines just 10 days before the presidential election, officials said Thursday, saying the blaze appeared to be criminal in nature but vowing it would not disrupt the vote.

Congo’s first use of voting machines on Dec. 23, a rarity in Africa, has caused concerns among the opposition, diplomats and experts about possible manipulation in favor of President Joseph Kabila’s preferred successor. Kabila is stepping aside after taking power in 2001.

The electoral commission said the fire broke out at a warehouse in Kinshasa, adding that it was too early to declare the cause or the extent of the damage.

Kabila’s chief adviser said the fire was a criminal one and that some 7,000 voting machines and polling booths were burned. “The enemies of democracy have stepped it up a gear,” Barnabe Kikaya said.

‘Ballot harvesting’ is when organized workers collect ballots from absentee voters and drop them off at a polling place or election office, violating the chain of custody. Ballot harvesting is illegal in North Carolina and Democrats are contesting a recent election due to allegations that a GOP operative collected ballots and discarded the votes for the Democrat candidate, Dan McCready, who has withdrawn his concession. Meanwhile, Democrats praise ballot harvesting in California where the party won 7 out of 14 races after Election Day. The biggest surprise was in Orange County where the Republican stronghold was turned blue after a whopping 250,000 votes were produced post-election. In fact, precinct 38083 in Orange County had a 120% turnout! There were 465 registered voters and 561 ballots cast in this precinct. The Republican party is ignoring the suspicious vote counts, so Judicial Watch is investigating.

In the latest chapter of the North Carolina election fraud saga, Vice Chair of the State Board of Elections Jens Lutz abruptly resigned last night. Things apparently got too hot to handle, and he began to feel...oh, I don't know, ill-equipped?... to manage the crisis properly. Judd Legum reported the resignation last night, writing in his newsletter:

Why? We don't know for sure but it may be related to his extensive connections to Leslie McCrae Dowless, the convicted felon at the center of the election fraud scandal in the 9th District.

Apparently, Lutz was helping to conduct the investigation into the elections shenanigans, but was also in business with one of the people he was investigating for said shenanigans, Leslie McCrae Dowless. Bad form. Also, illegal, probably. But, as Legum reports, not to worry. The actual CHAIR of the Board of Elections in North Carolina is not friends with McCrae Dowless. They're just cousins.

At the center of the possible irregularities sits McCrae Dowless, an electioneer and elected vice chairman of the Bladen Soil and Water Conservation. Two women told Charlotte TV station WSOC that Dowless paid them to pick up voters' absentee ballots.

The outlet also cites affidavits in which voters claim a person picked up their absentee ballots. In one case, a voter said her ballot was uncompleted when it was taken.

s evidence of serious election fraud continues to mount in North Carolina's 9th Congressional District, and with calls growing to hold a new election, the prospects for GOP candidate Mark Harris of actually being seated are growing dimmer by the day.

But the damage done by this scandal goes beyond a congressional candidate not being seated. The whole affair taints the North Carolina Republican Party.

One of the final unresolved races of the 2018 midterm elections has entered an uncertain phase, fueled by accusations of election fraud.

The exact path forward for the state’s 9th Congressional District race is unclear after the North Carolina State Board of Elections on Friday decided not to certify the initial results between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready, in which Harris appears to have edged McCready by 905 votes.

Around 25,000 Georgians protested Sunday against the election of a ruling party-backed candidate to the presidency and demanded snap parliamentary polls in a move that threatens to complicate the transition of power in the Western-backed nation.

Holding Georgian and EU flags, protesters alleged vote-buying and other irregularities as they packed Rustaveli Avenue in front of the parliament building in the center of the Georgian capital Tbilisi.

The former reformist president and leader of the 2003 "Rose Revolution" Mikheil Saakashvili addressed the huge crowd by video link from Amsterdam, where he lives in self-imposed exile.

"Misha! Misha!" chanted supporters as the flamboyant 50-year-old politician appeared on a big screen.

"Georgia's future is being born on this square today," said Saakashvili, accused by the authorities of abuse of power.

The embattled Broward County Supervisor of Elections rescinded her resignation Saturday, a day after Gov. Rick Scott suspended her without pay.

"After a series of inexcusable actions, it's clear that there needs to be an immediate change in Broward County and taxpayers should no longer be burdened by paying a salary for a Supervisor of Elections who has already announced resignation," Scott said in a statement Friday.

"I know that Pete will be solely focused on running free and fair elections, will not be running for election and will bring order and integrity back to this office."

After nearly two weeks, the Sunshine State's darkest recurring political nightmare is over.

Florida's recount process was marred by accusations of incompetence, antiquated voting technology and even a ballot design issue that some Democrats believe cost them a Senate seat. Republicans and the president even suggested — without evidence — that voter fraud had been committed.

After Nearly 2 Weeks and 2 Recounts, Florida Senate Race Ends
For some it brought back flashbacks to the 2000 presidential election, when the nation's attention was brought to Florida's humiliating, poorly-organized recount procedure.

A day after the recount was finalized, with the state's gubernatorial and senate races in the GOP column, campaign lawyers and election administration experts are chewing over the recount process and what went wrong.

Broward County Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes tendered her resignation on Sunday as more evidence of fraud – including thousands of ‘missing’ votes and counting of wrong ballots – has surfaced in Florida.

The Florida recount effort has seen numerous instances of fraud, particularly in Palm Beach and Broward Counties.

Citing a “flawed process,” the New York Times on Friday reported that thousands of votes had simply disappeared during the machine recount of Florida’s midterm races.

That number is expected to climb by an additional 2,000 plus votes when Broward’s updated results are added to the count. Snipes had been accused of intentionally filing results two minutes past the deadline when she realized the numbers were going to make matters worse for the Democrat candidates.

She has since resigned as the glaring examples of fraud in Florida mount.

Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is considering asking a court to intervene in her race against Republican Brian Kemp and order an extraordinary second round of voting in response to charges of election irregularities.

The long-shot strategy, first reported by the Associated Press, comes as Georgia elections officials appear to be poised to certify Kemp as the winner in the hard-fought contest as early as Friday.

If Abrams moves forward, she would rely on a provision in Georgia law that has never been utilized in such a high-profile contest. It allows losing candidates to challenge results based on “misconduct, fraud or irregularities .?.?. sufficient to change or place in doubt the results.” The decision could ultimately fall to the state’s Supreme Court.

The Florida Democratic Party allegedly instructed workers and volunteers to reach out to voters who submitted mail-in ballots with signature issues and requested that they resolve the discrepancies after the Florida deadline, reported The Naples Daily News.

The instructions came after Election Day already passed, making the effort a violation of Florida’s election rules.

Bombshell numbers out of Fulton County, Georgia show that a vast amount of the provisional ballots submitted in the Democrat stronghold were rejected for being duplicate ballots.

Now, the Democrat Stacey Abrams campaign is pushing on Fulton County, running an entire campaign-style operation with phone banking, texts and email blasts to reach out to people who allegedly cast provisional ballots on Election Day.

Abrams’ search for provisional ballots may yield fruit, but her search for credible provisional ballots that can be counted in this election will prove futile. Why?

A full 1,811 provisional ballots in Fulton County were duplicates (49 percent), and 1,556 of them (42 percent of the total provisionals) were rejected.

Florida’s local election supervisors reacted with skepticism Wednesday to a push by state authorities to remove thousands of potential non-U.S. citizens from the voting rolls, only months before the 2012 elections in which the coveted swing state will play a key role.

The supervisors, meeting at their annual summer conference, peppered state election officials with questions about the list of more than 2,600 registered voters who have been identified as being in Florida legally but ineligible to vote. That list was sent to supervisors recently, but state officials have also said there may be as many as 182,000 registered voters who may not be citizens.

A federal judge has allowed some Floridians who had their mail-in votes rejected to attest to their votes’ validity by 5 p.m. on Nov. 17 and have the votes counted.

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker ruled on Nov. 15 that some voters were denied the opportunity to validate, or cure, their rejected votes by the lawful deadline and thus deserve an exception.

These votes were rejected because the signatures on the ballots were determined by election officials to not match the voters’ signatures on record with the elections’ authorities.

Walker’s ruling came amid a machine recount of more than 8 million votes cast in Florida’s tight senator, governor, and agriculture commissioner races. The recount finished on Nov. 15, with candidates in the Senate and commissioner races separated by a margin of less than 0.25 percent, which triggers a hand recount. Only the commissioner race has a Democrat in the lead.

GOP Senate candidate Rick Scott and a host of others are accusing a pair of Florida counties of intentionally missing a recount deadline, a move that actually helped Democrats avoid losing more votes.

In what has been described as a “stunning development,” election officials in Broward County submitted their recount results two minutes after the deadline, meaning the state will not use those numbers.

All recount efforts in Broward this past week have thus been invalidated.

Scott had gained votes in the county by virtue of his opponent, incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, losing more.

A federal judge rejected a push by Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson to extend the machine recount deadline in a Thursday ruling in which the judge labeled Florida a “laughingstock” because of its election failures.

“We have been the laughingstock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this,” U.S. District Judge Mark Walker said in the ruling, which he handed down on the same afternoon that Florida’s Palm Beach County missed the machine recount deadline at 3 p.m. Thursday.

Walker decided that Florida’s 67 counties will still have to submit machine recount results at 3 p.m. Thursday, reported the Associated Press. However, Walker ruled earlier Thursday morning to grant 4,000 Florida voters an extension until 5 p.m. Saturday to verify their mail-in and provisional ballots if they were rejected for signature mismatches.

A federal court judge on Thursday ruled that thousands of voters whose votes weren’t counted because of issues with their signatures on their mail-in or provisional ballots have two more days to challenge the decision to reject their votes.

The order from U.S. District Court judge Mark Walker came hours before a 3 p.m. deadline for counties to report the results of a machine recount for the U.S. Senate, governor and agriculture commissioner contests, throwing more uncertainty over a process that faces a spate of legal challenges.

Georgia State Senator Nikema Williams was arrested Tuesday as protesters filled the State Capitol to demand ballots be recounted from last week’s election including the hotly contested race for governor.

The Democrat state senator was hauled off to Fulton County jail as supporters of Stacey Abrams try to persuade officials to count thousands of disallowed votes so she can force a runoff against Republican Brian Kemp.

It is the latest in a long line of examples in which Democrats seem incapable of accepting election results.

Williams was led out of the rotunda with hands zip-tied behind her back after Capitol police ordered the protesters out. Lawmakers had met to discuss dispersing funds for hurricane relief when the mob activity broke out. The law prohibits people from interrupting the state legislature with “loud, threatening, or abusive language.”